Full Faith and Credit Makes an Ohio Judgment Count in Texas, Within Limits

Picture, as a hypothetical, a man who loses a lawsuit in Columbus, owes a contractor a large sum, and decides the simplest solution is to move to Houston, buy a nice truck and start fresh. Under the Articles of Confederation he might have had a decent chance of getting away with it. Under the Constitution, the contractor follows him with a piece of paper, and Texas has to treat that paper as if a Texas court had signed it.

That piece of paper is the work of one short sentence in Article IV, the Full Faith and Credit Clause. It is one of the quiet hinges of the Union. Without it, fifty states would be fifty separate legal islands, and every judgment, marriage, deed and custody order would stop at the state line like a car without a passport. With it, the states remain sovereign in their own lawmaking, yet bound to respect one another's final decisions. Let's read the clause, trace its history, and draw the line the Supreme Court has drawn between judgments, which travel, and laws, which mostly do not.

The text

Article IV, Section 1 reads:

Full Faith and Credit shall be given in each State to the public Acts, Records, and judicial Proceedings of every other State. And the Congress may by general Laws prescribe the Manner in which such Acts, Records and Proceedings shall be proved, and the Effect thereof.

There are two sentences, and each matters.

1. The command. Each state must give "Full Faith and Credit" to three things from every other state: "public Acts" (statutes), "Records" (deeds, certificates and official records), and "judicial Proceedings" (judgments of courts).
2. The power. Congress may by "general Laws" prescribe how those acts, records and proceedings are proved, "and the Effect thereof." That second phrase, the effects provision, gives Congress authority to say what effect one state's judgments and records shall have in another.

Notice the phrase "general Laws." Congress is not given power to pick and choose case by case. It may write general rules. That limitation matters when we come to recent fights.

Where it came from

The clause did not appear from nowhere. The Articles of Confederation, in their Article IV, already provided that full faith and credit should be given in each state to the records, acts and judicial proceedings of the courts and magistrates of every other state. The phrase was familiar.

What the Articles lacked was any way to make the promise work. There was no national judiciary to enforce it and no power in Congress to say what "full faith and credit" meant in practice. Under the Articles, a state court could treat a sister state's judgment as mere evidence of a debt, to be argued all over again. The Framers added the effects provision so Congress could settle the matter. We compare the two charters at length in The Articles of Confederation Next to the Constitution, Side by Side.

Madison noticed the gap. In Federalist 42 he observed that the power to prescribe the manner of proof and the effect of public acts and judicial proceedings was an evident and valuable improvement on the Articles, because the meaning of the old clause was extremely indeterminate and could be of little importance under any interpretation.

The Act of 1790 and Mills v. Duryee

The First Congress used the power almost at once. An act of May 26, 1790, prescribed how state records and judicial proceedings were to be authenticated, and declared that judicial proceedings so authenticated shall have such faith and credit given to them in every court within the United States as they have by law or usage in the courts of the state from which they are taken. That language lives on, revised, in 28 U.S.C. 1738.

The rule is elegant. An Ohio judgment has in Texas the same effect it has in Ohio. If it is final and binding in Ohio, it is final and binding in Texas. Texas does not get to retry the case.

The Supreme Court confirmed this early. In Mills v. Duryee (1813), Justice Joseph Story held that a New York judgment sued on in the District of Columbia could not be treated as mere evidence of a debt, open to re-examination. It had to be given the conclusive effect it would have in New York. Otherwise, Story reasoned, the clause would accomplish almost nothing beyond what courts already did as a matter of courtesy.

Judgments travel with full force

The Court has taken the rule about judgments very seriously, even when it produces results a state dislikes.

The classic illustration is Fauntleroy v. Lum (1908). A gambling debt arose in Mississippi, where the contract was illegal and unenforceable. The creditor sued in Missouri and obtained a judgment there. He then brought the Missouri judgment back to Mississippi to enforce it. Mississippi objected that its own law made the debt void. The Supreme Court, in an opinion by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, held that Mississippi had to enforce the Missouri judgment anyway. A judgment is a judgment. If the Missouri court made a mistake about Mississippi law, the remedy was an appeal in Missouri, not a refusal in Mississippi.

That is a hard rule, and it is supposed to be. Finality is the point. A family that wins a judgment, after the expense and time of litigation, should not have to win it again in every state where the losing party owns property. Today most states have adopted a version of the Uniform Enforcement of Foreign Judgments Act, which lets a creditor register a sister-state judgment and enforce it like a local one, without filing a new lawsuit. The hypothetical man in Houston will find that the contractor's paperwork arrives faster than his moving van.

Williams v. North Carolina: divorce and domicile

The clause meets real life most dramatically in family law.

In the 1940s, Nevada offered divorces after only six weeks of residence. Many couples who wanted to end their marriages quickly traveled there. Two North Carolina residents, O. B. Williams and Lillie Shaver Hendrix, did exactly that. Each obtained a Nevada divorce from their spouses, then married each other in Nevada and returned to North Carolina, where they were prosecuted for bigamous cohabitation on the ground that North Carolina did not recognize the Nevada divorces.

In Williams v. North Carolina (1942), the Supreme Court held that North Carolina had to give full faith and credit to a Nevada divorce decree granted to a person domiciled in Nevada, even though the other spouse was not there. A state where a spouse is truly domiciled may dissolve the marriage.

But the story did not end there. In the second Williams case, in 1945, the Court held that North Carolina could examine for itself whether the couple had truly established domicile in Nevada, since domicile was the foundation of Nevada's jurisdiction. A North Carolina jury found they had not, and the convictions stood. The lesson: a judgment travels with full force, but only if the court that issued it had jurisdiction in the first place.

Laws are different: Baker v. General Motors

Here is the limit that matters most. The clause speaks of "public Acts" as well as judgments, but the Supreme Court has long held that states owe much less deference to each other's statutes than to each other's judgments.

The reason is common sense. If every state had to apply every other state's laws, no state could apply its own. A Texas court hearing a Texas dispute applies Texas law, even if Ohio would handle the matter differently. The Court has held that a state may generally apply its own law to a case so long as it has significant contacts with the dispute, rather than being forced to apply a sister state's statute.

Baker v. General Motors (1998) drew the distinction sharply. A former General Motors engineer, Ronald Elwell, had settled a dispute with the company in Michigan, and the Michigan court entered an injunction barring him from testifying against GM in product-liability cases. Later, a Missouri family, the Bakers, sued GM over a fatal accident and sought Elwell's testimony. GM argued that Missouri had to honor the Michigan injunction.

The Supreme Court, in an opinion by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, held that it did not. The Court explained that its precedent differentiates the credit owed to laws, which is not exacting, from the credit owed to judgments, which is exacting. And even a judgment cannot control proceedings in another state against people who were not parties to it. Michigan could bind Elwell and GM; it could not tell a Missouri court what evidence the Bakers could present in their own case.

Congress and the effects provision

Because the clause lets Congress prescribe "the Effect" of state acts and judgments, Congress has written several statutes that matter to ordinary families.

• Child custody. The Parental Kidnapping Prevention Act of 1980 requires states to enforce custody determinations made consistently with its rules, which discourages a parent from taking a child across state lines to shop for a friendlier court.
• Child support. The Full Faith and Credit for Child Support Orders Act of 1994 requires states to enforce sister-state support orders and limits their power to modify them.
• Protection orders. The Violence Against Women Act of 1994 requires states to enforce valid protection orders issued by other states.
• Marriage. Congress used the effects provision in the Defense of Marriage Act of 1996, whose Section 2 said no state need recognize a same-sex marriage from another state. After Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), the Respect for Marriage Act of 2022 repealed that section and requires states to recognize marriages validly performed in other states.

Each of these is a "general Law" in the constitutional sense. Whatever one thinks of any particular statute, they show the effects provision is a real power that Congress uses.

The strongest objection, and the answer

The objection. Full faith and credit is a federal intrusion on state sovereignty. Every judgment a Texas court must enforce is one Texas did not make, under procedures Texas did not choose, sometimes applying laws Texas has rejected. A conservative committed to federalism should want each state free to decide which outside decisions it will honor. Fauntleroy forced Mississippi to collect a gambling debt its own law forbade. That is not federalism; it is Missouri governing Mississippi.

The answer.

1. Federalism is a Union, not a scattering. The Founders did not create fifty independent nations. They created states that keep their own lawmaking power while forming one country. A Union in which no court's judgment is final across a state line would reward debtors and absconding parents and punish the honest.
2. The clause protects state sovereignty in its most important form. Each state keeps the right to make its own laws for its own territory. Baker confirms that a state need not adopt its neighbors' statutes. What it must respect is the final decision of a sister state's court in a case that court had jurisdiction to decide. That is mutual respect, not subordination.
3. Jurisdiction is the safety valve. Williams II shows that a state may refuse a sister-state judgment issued without jurisdiction. The clause does not require deference to a court that had no business deciding the case.
4. The alternative is chaos for families. Without the clause, a custody order would stop at the border, a divorce valid in one state could be bigamy in the next, and a deed recorded in Ohio would be an argument in Texas. Families move. The law has to move with them.

The verdict: the Full Faith and Credit Clause is federalism working as designed, sovereign states bound together by mutual respect for one another's courts. We make the broader case in Federalism Lets Fifty States Experiment, and the Constitution Planned It.

What it means for a family that moves

Picture, hypothetically, a family that moves from Ohio to Texas.

• Their marriage, recorded in Ohio, is a marriage in Texas.
• A custody order entered by an Ohio court remains binding, and Texas courts will generally defer to Ohio's continuing jurisdiction for a time under the rules Congress and the states have adopted.
• A judgment they won in Ohio can be registered and enforced against the debtor's property in Texas.
• But the laws that govern their new life, from property and inheritance to licensing and education, are Texas laws. Full faith and credit does not carry Ohio's statutes along in the moving truck.

That last point is worth stressing. Some licenses, such as concealed-carry permits and professional licenses, are not judgments, and the clause does not require a state to honor them. Recognition depends on each state's statutes and on agreements between states. That is why reciprocity is a subject for state legislatures and, for some licenses, for proposed federal legislation. We discuss one state's approach to professional licenses in arizona's universal license recognition and the case for copying it. A companion clause in Article IV, discussed in Article IV Stops States From Punishing Americans for Being From Somewhere Else, protects newcomers from being treated as outsiders in fundamental matters.

The case in brief

1. Article IV, Section 1 requires each state to give full faith and credit to the acts, records and judicial proceedings of every other state, and lets Congress prescribe their effect by general laws.
2. The Act of 1790, now 28 U.S.C. 1738, gives a state judgment the same effect everywhere that it has at home, as Mills v. Duryee (1813) and Fauntleroy v. Lum (1908) enforced.
3. The credit owed to laws is far weaker than the credit owed to judgments, as Baker v. General Motors (1998) explained, so each state keeps its own lawmaking power.
4. A judgment issued without jurisdiction need not be honored, as Williams v. North Carolina (1945) allowed for a divorce resting on a sham domicile.
5. Properly understood, the clause is federalism's glue, not its enemy: sovereign states, one Union, final judgments.

What you can do: if your family is moving across state lines, check your new state's legislature website for its version of the foreign-judgments and custody-jurisdiction acts, and read Article IV in full on our Constitution page.